This one came from Upstairs with an unusual amount of context. Normally they just send the crate down and let me get on with it. This time there was a note. The note said: this is the one that was published without a name on it, and people thought it was by the person it was about, and then the person it was about went to prison, and the person who actually wrote it spent the next fifty years asking for it not to be reprinted. They thought I would find this interesting. They were not wrong.

The Green Carnation was written by Robert Hichens, who was thirty years old in 1894 and had recently returned from Egypt, where he had been keeping company with Lord Alfred Douglas. He had also spent time in London, in the circles that knew what a green carnation in the buttonhole signalled and wore one accordingly. He was close enough to the world he was writing about to mimic it precisely. The epigrams in the novel are Wildean. They are Wildean enough that when the book appeared, without a name on it, a significant number of people who knew Wilde personally assumed he had written it himself.

Wilde denied this in the way Wilde denied things, which was not quite a denial. The book sold. The circles it described were small and everyone in them recognised themselves or recognised their friends.

Then Wilde was arrested. Then tried. Then convicted. Then Hichens quietly withdrew the book, and asked that it not be reprinted, and got on with the rest of his career. He wrote thirty more novels. The Garden of Allah was a massive bestseller. He lived to eighty-five. People continued, for the next five decades, to find copies of The Green Carnation and read it and write to him about it. He replied, apparently, with consistent grace and with no indication of how he actually felt about any of it.

Having now spent time with the book, I think I understand why it is strange to be its author. It is very good. It is much better than it was trying to be. Hichens was writing what he thought was a light satirical entertainment about people he knew slightly, in the manner of those people, and what he produced was a portrait of a whole world in its last summer — the wit, the posturing, the deliberately cultivated airlessness, the sense that sincerity was the most provincial of poses. It gets it right. It gets it right in the way that things written by people who are half inside and half outside a world sometimes get it right: with affection, with amusement, and with a clarity that the people fully inside cannot quite access.

Lady Locke, the novel’s conscience, watches Esmé Amarinth and decides she cannot follow him. Her decision arrives so quietly that I had read past it before I realised the book had made its judgment. That is a technique.

The StoriesTyped Annotated Edition is on Kindle now. Two essays, a biography, the introduction, and the closing note from the basement. The YouTube introduction is up if you want to see how the opening pages begin before you commit.

Hichens lived to eighty-five and the book outlasted him. It has now been reprinted many times and is read by people who find it in footnotes to Oscar Wilde’s biography. This is possibly what he feared and possibly what he hoped for. He did not say.

— G. H. Schreiber

06/05/2026